UK to ISPs: Prioritize away! (so long as you tell users)

The new UK government doesn't like regulations, and it's not planning to …

Europe, and the UK in particular, has long championed the view that its countries don't really need net neutrality regulations because they have more ISP competition (unlike those poor schlubs in the US). If consumers don't like an ISP's behavior, they can switch. With the new Tory/Lib Dem coalition government in power, the anti-regulatory mood has grown even stronger.

"This Government is no fan of regulation and we should only intervene when it is clearly necessary to deliver important benefits for consumers," said Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, in a speech today on net neutrality.

"At the heart of this debate," he added, "is the extent to which traffic should be managed on the Internet, and more specifically whether ISPs should ever have the right to favour one content provider over another, particularly for commercial reasons."

In Vaizey's view, yes, they should.

The ability to do paid prioritization in the UK is contingent on two principles: 1) ISPs can't block any legal content or service and 2) ISPs have to be transparent about the ways in which they are manipulating traffic.

Those two principles are Vaizey's pro-consumer measures; his third principle of Internet regulation is that the government should "support investment and innovation," which "means allowing flexibility in business models... This could include the evolution of a two-sided market where consumers and content providers could choose to pay for differing levels of quality of service... The important thing is that ISPs and networks remain free to innovate. In doing so they may make mistakes and consumers should have the ability to make them pay for those mistakes."

Back inside the walled garden?

This is the sort of talk that the Open Rights Group was founded to resist. Sure enough, ORG director Jim Killock blasted Vaizey's approach to the Internet.

"Money and commercial interest can easily over-ride public interest if we do not assert it," he said today. His response is worth quoting at some length, as it's an excellent articulation of one point of view:

In other words, ISPs should be encouraged to find ways to charge for content delivery to help invest in their networks. We see the start of this with services like BT Vision, which uses BT’s networks deliver television programmes through a service that is only accessible to BT customers.

Such services work in stark contrast with delivering content through services like Netflix, iTunes or the current BBC iPlayer. Each of these services competes directly, and customers can easily choose between them in a fully competitive market.

It seems that regulators like [UK telecoms regulator] Ofcom and ministers of our governments do not see the future of the Internet as being best served through such competition, but wish to encourage “walled gardens” of ISP-provided services.

This might suit ISPs who want income, or governments who want easy answers to pay for network investment, but it will not serve customers of services well. It will undermine the competitive nature of the Internet, and provide opportunities for market abuse.

Walled gardens can easily work to further segment and control markets, and tip the balance against innovation, towards established copyright industry players. By doing so, they can limit the access of different voices to audiences, and limit the power of our freedom of speech. This is why this debate matters, and why Ed Vaizey is wrong to dismiss it.

The debate here echoes similar concerns in the US about "managed services," whereby ISPs would leave the "open Internet" alone but would be free to create separate, quality-controlled services of their own that run over the same connection.

61 Reader Comments

This is OK in the UK, because they (apparently) have much more competition and line sharing rules. This wouldn't fly (or, shouldn't.. well, to an extent - I have no problem with an ISP blocking illegal traffic) in North America where at best you have a duopoly of providers (and even though we have line sharing in Canada, third party ISP customers are throttled as well.. sigh)

Yeah, I'd be happy to leave this issue for market forces to decide, if there were actually a free market in place to exert such forces. As it is, as long as ISP's dont have to share their lines, there's an effectively impenetrable barrier to entry - just as there is for starting a new natural gas or electricity provider in an established market, without the ability to lease access to existing infrastructure, because the cost of laying down new infrastructure is prohibitively high.

Interestingly, I don't hear many net neutrality opponents suggest that we go back to forced line sharing.

Yeah, I'd be happy to leave this issue for market forces to decide, if there were actually a free market in place to exert such forces. As it is, as long as ISP's dont have to share their lines, there's an effectively impenetrable barrier to entry - just as there is for starting a new natural gas or electricity provider in an established market, without the ability to lease access to existing infrastructure, because the cost of laying down new infrastructure is prohibitively high.

Interestingly, I don't hear many net neutrality opponents suggest that we go back to forced line sharing.

Yeah sure but where is the incentive? The best way to go is government laid out lines and then line sharing.

Just line sharing while having some poor sucker pay to expand doesn't work well.

See: Canada and UK which aren't in a much better boat then the US is.

All the countries with super fast cheap internet all had the government pay for it.

Interestingly, I don't hear many net neutrality opponents suggest that we go back to forced line sharing.

I guess I fall in the 'net neutrality opponent' category. I'm not against net neutrality per se, I'm against unnecessary regulation restricting the use of private property. If you view it in that light, line sharing makes even less sense than net neutrality.

AdamM - that's not my point. I'm not claiming they have been given sufficient taxpayer's money or leeway to build that network - I'm just curious to know whether the existing infrastructure can be completely classed as "private property" in the way ShlomoAbraham seems to be suggesting.

Interestingly, I don't hear many net neutrality opponents suggest that we go back to forced line sharing.

I guess I fall in the 'net neutrality opponent' category. I'm not against net neutrality per se, I'm against unnecessary regulation restricting the use of private property. If you view it in that light, line sharing makes even less sense than net neutrality.

I agree. I think the telco, cable, and fiber companies should pay me to lease the right-of-way across my private property. The government granted, monopolistic regulation allowing them their unfettered easement of my property goes too far.

Edit: And pay me for the loss of mineral rights access since I can't dig near the lines they put on my land.

I'm just curious to know whether the existing infrastructure can be completely classed as "private property" in the way ShlomoAbraham seems to be suggesting.

in the case of the cable industry, little to none. With telecom, there are various incentives.

However, one shouldn't have anything to do with the other. If accepting money from the government resulted in a lifetime of implicit obligation via regulation, the government would find it much harder to incentivise private industry.

AdamM - that's not my point. I'm not claiming they have been given sufficient taxpayer's money or leeway to build that network - I'm just curious to know whether the existing infrastructure can be completely classed as "private property" in the way ShlomoAbraham seems to be suggesting.

Oh i'm not sure.

But saying they've been wasting the money and should be relegated to line sharing is a slippery slope as well.

Verizon and Comcast both offer 50mb+ services. Most people near metro areas have access to 15mb+ services. Some states have ISP's that offer 100mb+.

I just feel that all this is being conveniently ignored. To an outsider ARS would make it appear that we are all stuck on 768k and the select few may get 6mb when its not the case.

We're not the best sure. We can't compete with the small nations like SK and Japan. But what other nations of our size are? We should be compared to other countries of our size like Brazil, China, and Canada we're not though because when you do. You find that the US is tops.

Shlomo - private industry has always had an implicit, and indeed explicit, obligation due to regulation.

I'm struggling to think of any private industry that operates under no regulation in the USA, but I'm obviously no expert.

Point taken re. the cable industry, though. Having had a quick look, there seems to be a rather vituperative set of articles which claim Verizon, AT&T etc have had the benefit of rather a large amount of public money:

What a crack up. The two anti-net neutrality users here posting right in a row. Who'd of thunk it.

Get back to me when you're not corporate whores. Net neutrality only benefits everyone.

I'm not anti-net neutrality.

Line sharing has nothing to do with Net Neutrality. I support Net Neutrality actually.

I support traffic all being treated the same. I don't support forcing a company to share lines it paid for.

What if the agreement were to force all internet providers that use the line to pay the original owner of said line, say, 2%-5% of the internet providers' yearly gross intake from the line in question? Say for the next 20 years.... Seems to me, 1) we'd get the competition we're so severely lacking in many parts of the US, 2) the original owner of the line would have incentive to let as many providers as possible onto the line (increasing the number of "cuts" they get), and 3) would allow the original owners of the lines to recoup much of their costs (again, taking into account #2, which would roll more money their way).

What a crack up. The two anti-net neutrality users here posting right in a row. Who'd of thunk it.

Get back to me when you're not corporate whores. Net neutrality only benefits everyone.

I'm not anti-net neutrality.

Line sharing has nothing to do with Net Neutrality. I support Net Neutrality actually.

I support traffic all being treated the same. I don't support forcing a company to share lines it paid for.

What if the agreement were to force all internet providers that use the line to pay the original owner of said line, say, 2%-5% of the internet providers' yearly gross intake from the line in question? Say for the next 20 years.... Seems to me, 1) we'd get the competition we're so severely lacking in many parts of the US, 2) the original owner of the line would have incentive to let as many providers as possible onto the line (increasing the number of "cuts" they get), and 3) would allow the original owners of the lines to recoup much of their costs (again, taking into account #2, which would roll more money their way).

What a crack up. The two anti-net neutrality users here posting right in a row. Who'd of thunk it.

Get back to me when you're not corporate whores. Net neutrality only benefits everyone.

Get back to us when you understand that the only reason you have an internet connection at all is capitalism.

Utter bollocks. The only reason you have an Internet connection is because it is was invented.

You may see the Internet as being some great wonder service everyone must pay for but firms are saving a fortune using the Internet to communicate with people and providing services. Basic dial up Internet would be in the corporate worlds interest to provide free and technology from the twentieth century is more than good enough.

What if the agreement were to force all internet providers that use the line to pay the original owner of said line, say, 2%-5% of the internet providers' yearly gross intake from the line in question? Say for the next 20 years.... Seems to me, 1) we'd get the competition we're so severely lacking in many parts of the US, 2) the original owner of the line would have incentive to let as many providers as possible onto the line (increasing the number of "cuts" they get), and 3) would allow the original owners of the lines to recoup much of their costs (again, taking into account #2, which would roll more money their way).

I don't see how competition gains by this, and any gains would be anti-neutrality as this article points to...

All these various 'Internet resellers' would still be price constrained by the cost of leasing the line. So Reseller A and Reseller B couldn't really compete on price. They can't really compete on customer service either, because if the problem is with a network line, they have to deal with Original ISP, just like customer. So the only way Reseller A and Reseller B will end up competing is on proprietary/managed services. Which is exactly what the article points out.

What a crack up. The two anti-net neutrality users here posting right in a row. Who'd of thunk it.

Get back to me when you're not corporate whores. Net neutrality only benefits everyone.

Cripes, nonshitty web pages are not that big. Not that much bandwidth is really needed. Much of America was able to survive on dialup internet. Increasing the bandwidth by a factor of 10x was good enough for most people. You want extra stuff, then pay more. I know that internet access is very helpful in modern society, but the important web pages do not have to be that big. Are we afraid that big ISPs are going to block the tiny, important websites and spare the big movie downloaders?

I'm not going to say I'm "anti-net-neutrality" because the term itself is far too overloaded. It means a lot of different things. I personally believe in a lot of what net-neutrality brings to the table, but it's usually presented too broadly for me to want it committed to legislation.

So let me ask this --

* If an ISP wanted to add a capability which could recognize some portion of my bandwidth (say 500kbps) as, say, a video chat (via a IP "type of service" bit, or some other such mechanism) and give it reduced loss/latency/jitter versus my other traffic -- should that be illegal?

* If an ISP wanted to automatically identify streaming media, and attempt to make that media not stop or stutter during periods of congestion (i.e. perhaps by identifying packets that can accept losses, like TCP, versus those that cannot, like UDP) -- should that be illegal?

If you answer "yes, OF COURSE those should be illegal" then, fine, congrats, you likely would support any kind of "net neutrality" likely to come along. I don't agree, but I respect that.

If your answer is more like "well, no... but I DON'T want them to be able to block NetFlix because they competes with the ISP, didn't pay extortion fees, etc", then I agree with you, and here's your membership to the "let's talk about what is acceptable and what isn't" club. Welcome, take a seat. You'll find plenty of available ones, because everyone else is still outside yelling past each other.

Seriously, respond to this post with your thoughts on the above. I, for one, would love to see how everyone feels. Maybe my instincts are just off-base, and I'm not the one "getting it".

I was happily surprised at NetFlix recently providing a well thought-out opinion on the issue, especially considering their position. Kudos to them. They seem to realize that to get anywhere, we need to start discussing reasonable compromises that address their own concerns, and those of many net-neutrality supporters, while not imposing unnecessary constraints on innovation.

There are a lot of good, fair, open, and inexpensive things that can be done to improve the network. I don't believe your best option is to just "throw enough bandwidth" at it. Congestion will always exist -- it is sporadic, intermittent, and unavoidable. And, frankly, it is inelegant and inefficient to minimize it via building and paying for a network 20X faster than it needs to be.

That's like making every road 20 lanes wide so that an ambulance can always pass without anyone having to pull over.

What a crack up. The two anti-net neutrality users here posting right in a row. Who'd of thunk it.

Get back to me when you're not corporate whores. Net neutrality only benefits everyone.

I'm not idealogically against net neutrality. If you want to use it in the US, that's fine by me. It sounds like a good solution to the problem you have with the lack of competition between ISPs.

What I'm against is its introduction to the UK, where it's a solution in search of a problem. It seems bizarre to me that Americans are so intent on exporting this idea without regard for different market conditions in other countries.

The article about net neutrality in Australia was particularly hilarious. The majority of the comments from American users were pro-neutrality. The majority of comments from Australian users were along the lines of, "No, we don't want this, it won't work here and here's why".

Back to today's article, and what I find bizarre is that Jim Killock mentioned Netflix in his statement. Netflix isn't available outside North America and very few people in the UK will know what it is, which makes me wonder who his intended audience is.

The problem with net neutrality arguments are that people generally dont really see that it becomes an onerous burden of regulation and then checks to ensure it works thereby increasing prices and stifling innovation. Forced equipment sharing is actually a better solution or ideally government intervention to create a giant fibre optic backbone system which then allows ISPs to compete on features and price.

One UK ISP used to offer a gaming subscription service which claimed to improve latency, if you cared enough you could pay £5 a month more for the improved service and feel that you would be better at your chosen game.

Back to today's article, and what I find bizarre is that Jim Killock mentioned Netflix in his statement. Netflix isn't available outside North America and very few people in the UK will know what it is, which makes me wonder who his intended audience is.

This is key together with...

AdamM wrote:

I support traffic all being treated the same. I don't support forcing a company to share lines it paid for.

BECAUSE our telcos are forced to share lines, we have a vast amount of competition and net neutrality is more or less irrelevant. Killock is speaking to an American market, where vast regions have two, possibly three ISPs due to the Republicans' (!) socialist market policies to protect the incumbents with public aid and banning effective capitalist competition at the prompting of lobbyists.

Because effective competition exists, net neutrality is not that big a deal. We can just grab another ISP if it doesn't fit our needs, they're always attacking each other with aggressive marketing. I can pick between seven who have DSLAMs locally and another several hundred who use BT Wholesale capacity. If ISP #194 decides to prioritise traffic I don't want and my experience suffers, I just go with ISP #23 or perhaps ISP #2 or maybe ISP #211...

As much as I detest the push for Net Neutrality, we should not be taking precedent from the United Kingdom. They have some of the worst broadband statistics in the world for their level of population density.

I want to know what sites this will actually effect. I'm guessing if youtube stops working probably a number of people will call customer support and get annoyied when they are told "oh, youtube don't pay us enough." It seems like we are talking about a few extra milli secound of loading time.

As much as I detest the push for Net Neutrality, we should not be taking precedent from the United Kingdom. They have some of the worst broadband statistics in the world for their level of population density.

Not sure why you're conflating net neutrality with "broadband statistics". Even if you are, what are these horrible statistics that you refer to? The UK has a very competitive broadband infrastructure. Broadband ADSL reaches 99.9% of the population and cable passes more than half of all households. Seems pretty healthy to me and is set to get better. Regulated competition is not always an oxymoron .

Yeah, I'd be happy to leave this issue for market forces to decide, if there were actually a free market in place to exert such forces.

Bingo! Winner is you, as the geeks say! The fact is that in the United States and in the U.K. there isn't any real 'free market' as things stand today because there is no forced line-sharing and a few other things.

In the UK at least, where line sharing is mandated in certain areas, the lines are not shared for free - the owner leases the lines to the competition. The lines must be leased at "cost based prices" (i.e., not profit from leasing, but not free to competitors).

If my UK ISP starts mucking about I'll just migrate to XILO or Fast. I can be pretty certain with XILO that, although tbey are not cheapest, they are interested in providing a neutral service with great quality. There are plenty of smaller ISPs out there that will gladly service people who leave the ISPs that want to dictate what customers can do with their bandwidth.

Yeah, I'd be happy to leave this issue for market forces to decide, if there were actually a free market in place to exert such forces.

As it is, as long as ISP's dont have to share their lines, there's an effectively impenetrable barrier to entry - just as there is for starting a new natural gas or electricity provider in an established market, without the ability to lease access to existing infrastructure, because the cost of laying down new infrastructure is prohibitively high.

I broke up your quote - you do realise that your first sentence completely contradicts the second, right? People who squark 'free-market' almost always eventually contradict themselves. "Yeah, yeah, we should let the market decide, just as soon as we take away the billions of dollars/puounds/euros of infrastructure that this one monopoly owns". And who should do that? Well the government I suppose... the big, bad, tax-money squandering socialist bastards in power... right?

Why don't we also let the free-market run the roads, and that way huge businesses can dedicate important fast roads to their CEOs and sales reps.

I think the attention paid to net neutrality of overblown. I don't believe there is a public right to content requiring high capacities and that the realm of competetion for such content (primarily video) is wider than on the internet. Competition is more than just the one or two ISPs. If I want to watch a movie I can get it from a store, by mail order, rent via mail, a redbox kiosk, pay per view, regular cable, internet streaming, or watch something else over the air (or read a book). It's not a right to see whatever movie you want how and when you want, so I'm not going to shed tears that some guy in the country has to way a few days for a netflix video to arrive. There is a public good associated with high-speed internet in schools and libraries and a minimum available to homes (which, now, 1.5mbs is enough). As for voice, we already have subsidized universal phone service.

Asside from the requirements of transparancy and providing an affordable minimal level of service, I vote let's leave the government out of this one.

We're talking corporations here people. Innovation? By deregulating the ability to cripple connections? What sort of innovation do you really expect to come from this? Really now? These people will invest as little as possible in infrastructure raise prices as much as possible and deliver sub-par services and products time and again if not for competition(see what happens pretty much every time someone has monopoly.). Even with competition, if what you have is an oligopoly bad things can still happen.

Without regulation abuse is the name of the game, this idea that corporations are in it for your well being, has proven time and again to be nothing more than BS. Corporations don't want more freedom and deregulation to benefit the people, they want such freedom to enrich themselves, to increase their profit, and abuse the system as much as possible.

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One UK ISP used to offer a gaming subscription service which claimed to improve latency, if you cared enough you could pay £5 a month more for the improved service and feel that you would be better at your chosen game.

Just as likely that they'd cripple their services and sell you the means to use it uncrippled.

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If ISP #194 decides to prioritise traffic I don't want and my experience suffers, I just go with ISP #23 or perhaps ISP #2 or maybe ISP #211...

If they start profiting significantly from the practice and it becomes ubiquitous. As in the choice of politicians the masses are unlikely to be able to enact the required change, like one vote one choice means pretty much nothing. It won't matter how many options you have, if only one or a few obscure providers retain unprioritized traffic.

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a number of people will call customer support and get annoyied when they are told "oh, youtube don't pay us enough."

They likely won't tell them that.

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I don't believe there is a public right to content requiring high capacities and that the realm of competition for such content (primarily video) is wider than on the internet.

We can't know the future. Wireless neural interfaces might one day provide access to photorealistic virtual worlds with full sensory experience. High bandwidth content should be a right. Things like free hd university lectures, live video conference access, etc should be available to all not simply some lowly text files.

1. In the UK we are usually tied to a contract. Ie you sign up to your ISP for 12/18/24 months (Rolling contract after that) and then find out that they are limiting a certain service. Will i get to cancel my contract without having to pay a fee for the early cancellation?

Folks, I'm not going to say I'm "anti-net-neutrality" because the term itself is far too overloaded. It means a lot of different things. I personally believe in a lot of what net-neutrality brings to the table, but it's usually presented too broadly for me to want it committed to legislation.... other stuff, etc. ...-netchipguy

The 'Net grew organically out of its participants' collective actions and decisions. People's freedom to invent new protocols, new markup languages, new media delivery methods, or just that any of these things exist at all in any form was enabled by the fact that no one had decided with any finality what the network was for.

When you start allowing, encouraging, or creating methods to limit certain kinds of traffic and enhance other kinds of traffic, you start shaping a prescriptive vision of the Internet. Delineating services merely according to what the 'Net looks like at the moment distorts later innovation by not-so-gently guiding it down the paths of existing paradigms.

Say, hypothetically, that certain P2P methods could evolve into a superior means of distributing any content at all (even web sites and live video), and that current streaming methods turn out to be a technological dead end. If you squash torrents now and fast-track streaming, the former can't happen and old streaming techniques won't die gracefully because they're unnaturally advantaged through ISP meddling.

A messy, unregulated internet is a healthy one in the long-term, congestion or no.

the internet is great because you can access whatever you want equally. It also gives everyone an equal shot at getting their idea/product/design/whatever out there to the masses. Once you start prioritizing things, you lose everything that's great about it.